Abstract
Since the Industrial Revolution and with the rapid changes of production-consumption paradigms, cities have become a hotspot for materials-energy consumption and urban modern anthropogenic activities have given birth to many multiscalar environmental distortions such as global warming, biodiversity loss, waste disposal and many other inter-linked environmental damages which affect each living being on our biosphere. Unfortunately, Earth’s life-support system is compromising each year and it is unable to sustain the upcoming population growth and its divergent needs as such bringing world’s economy, population size, urban activities, and modern living standards and habits with the global environmental thresholds are irrefutable to maintain human civilization in our solar system. Our research tends to exhibit that Algiers, as one of MICs major cities, is knowing a sever ecological deficit, results show that the city is operating beyond its biocapacity with 464 201 global hectares of carbon overshoot. Here we intend to show that local authorities can redesign the current urban model using the carbon footprint to build a new one less vulnerable, more resilient and perfectly sustainable. Our goal is to show that Algiers, and also all cities within the MENA region, an urban ecosystem is not in a dynamic nor a static equilibrium likewise these cities are too vulnerable to the new extreme climate events, as such, redesigning cities’ urban model using environmental thresholds “biocapacity” for instance is thus highly relevant to upgrade the coping capacity of urban ecosystems. Notice that the current research does not aim to explain the divergent transdisciplinary meanings of resiliency nor the dilemma of whether to include or exclude the carbon footprint component from the holistic ecological footprint indicator computation. Not surprisingly, we highly believe that “resiliency” could be a new urban utopia, the vague promise of a radiant horizon for humankind survival from the terrifying perspective of Anthropocene.
